“It’s both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.”

Almost every episode of the YouTube series Tropes Vs Women in Video Games includes a variation on these clear and unambiguous words. Spoken by the cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, they provide a foreword to her discussions of the games industry and its treatment of female characters. The content of these videos shouldn’t really be that controversial; it is Sarkeesian talking to camera, providing a feminist reading of certain aspects of popular games – in the same way a feminist film critic may study popular cinema. And yet, Sarkeesian needs security guards whenever she makes public appearances – that’s if she’s not forced to pull out of speaking engagements due to bomb threats.

Now, she and her media company Feminist Frequency are planning a new series of videos on the portrayal of masculine identities in games. It’s likely the threats will intensify once again.

Within certain online communities, an overwhelming narrative of hate has developed around Sarkeesian, depicting her work as an attack on “gamers”, with an underlying censorship agenda. At the heart of the backlash is a resistance to, and lack of understanding about, critical analysis. When Sarkeesian critiques the sexualised violence in, say, Grand Theft Auto, some gamers think her “goal” is for it to be banned – and they think she has the power and contacts to do so.

“There is definitely a tendency to massively overestimate the amount of influence that critics or academics have,” says video game theorist and researcher, Jesper Juul. “The mistake that some gamers make is, they falsely assume both that Sarkeesian wants to entirely change games ‘as we know them’ and that she has any kind of power for doing so.”

Damsels and damnation

Much of the resistance comes from Sarkeesian’s central argument: that the “damsel in distress” trope, a recurring trend in narrative game design, can help “to normalise extremely toxic, patronising and paternalistic attitudes about women.” Within the cauldron of online forums like 8Chan and Reddit, this nuanced proposition is shared, spun and simplified until it becomes a threatening maxim: “games cause sexism”. For some, this then recalls the damaging media scares of the 1990s when games were serially linked with and implicated in violent crimes – mostly by the tabloid press. Sarkeesian is even routinely compared to the anti-games campaigner Jack Thompson who brought several unsuccessful class action lawsuits against the publishers of violent games in the 90s and 2000s.

But of course, Sarkeesian isn’t suggesting that games are somehow the root cause of sexist ideologies. Instead, she acknowledges that many forms of media share similar issues and brings in statistics regarding real world violence against women to extend the analysis. “[Feminist Frequency] was my way of pulling feminist theory out of academia into a more public space for a wider audience,” she told Rolling Stone magazine last October. “I used popular culture because I’m a big geek, and these are the things that interest me: TV, movies, comic books, video games. But also, it’s the common language that we speak.”

“The reaction is like I’m trying to say that all games are bad, or all games should be taken away, or that these games shouldn’t exist, instead of ‘Hey, we are complex and intelligent creatures and we can hold multiple ideas in our heads at the same time.’ We can be critical of the things that we love. That is possible.”

Sarkeesian isn’t blaming games for sexism, she’s simply highlighting the ways in which they contribute to pre-existing ideas of women as objects to be coveted, saved and discarded. In her first Damsel in Distress video she traces the trope back to ancient Greek mythology, and throughout the Tropes Vs Women series makes regular references to the wider media as impacting our cultural ideologies and enforcing gender paradigms.

Part of the anger is also about some gamers feeling threatened that their culture is now being discussed beyond the communities they inhabit and control. “I don’t think Anita’s reaching out to people who are already part of gamer culture, but people who are outside of it,” say Anna Anthropy, a game designer, writer and historian. “That Anita – and other cultural critics – are talking to people who aren’t them is part of why gamers are so upset.”

Writer and academic Thryn Henderson picks up on a similar theme. “The games industry [has been] insular for so long that there’s been a lot of gravitating towards the same goals and ideals,” she says. “The attempt to discuss or deconstruct that now is seen as censorship - because people infer from that new discussion that they aren’t allowed to like those things anymore.”

The intense fear that Sarkeesian’s work is both a way to demonise gamers to ‘outsiders’ and a ploy to change games is epitomised within the false Thompson/Sarkeesian dichotomy. By likening these two completely disparate figures as “enemies of video games”, her work can be more efficiently reduced to a ridiculous strawmen argument: games cause sexism. The rhetoric often goes: well, the media has largely rejected concerns that video games somehow instigate deadly real world violence; so shouldn’t it now accept that sexism in games is a harmless convention?

But even the concerns about game violence are more nuanced than gaming forums tend to allow. “It’s easy to dispute that playing violent video games transforms people into serial killers,” says Anthropy. “But no one’s saying that. People are saying, should we be worried about how games glorify American military violence and make us more permissive of our military’s tactics? Are depictions of violence against women in games just normalising the violence against women that already happens in our culture?”

How hate prevents evaluation

But the portrayal of Sarkeesian and other feminist writers, designers and academics as pantomime villains, allows the gamer communities involved to avoid disucssion and analysis. It allows them to more easily rally against her. Frustratingly, this environment disallows discussion about what the Tropes vs Women videos are actually arguing. “There are clearly valid critiques to make of Sarkeesian’s work [...] we tend not to see those,” says Ian Bogost, game designer and academic. “Instead we see way out of line Internet abuse.” Anthropy agrees. “It’s tough, because how do you open a nuanced discussion of someone’s work when another group is loudly shouting for her head?”

While some gamers may demonise and abuse Sarkeesian for her attempts to address a broad audience and to highlight the fact that games aren’t as inclusive as they could be, there are other gamers who want to critique her work for not going deep enough, for failing to be intersectional and for presenting a sex negative perspective. But this is all lost amid the white noise of online hate.

This abuse isn’t new or unique and by the looks of things, it isn’t going away. Games are part of the cultural landscape now, but somehow investigating and discussing them, especially from a feminist perspective, is actually dangerous. Critique has become warfare, and while it’s a war that no one can win, it’s a war that games as a culture can definitely lose.

“This is the Internet,” says Bogost. “And since the Internet is now where we live and work in large part, this is our lives. It is a horrifying thought.”